Posts by Joe Grant

“What is it that you've learned, what are you able to do?"
"I can think. I can wait. I can fast." Siddhartha answering the merchant.
For the past three years, I’ve taken part in a seemingly odd annual ritual of coming to the pristine mountain town of Chamonix to sit and wait for 10 days – waiting, until the last Friday of August when with 2,500 other runners, I get to run around Mont Blanc.
My first year doing the race was in 2009, which was also my first time running a hundred miles. When I arrived, I was so awestruck with the new environment that I ran around the mountain in three days, right after stepping off the plane. Following the recon of the course, I could hardly contain my excitement, so I hiked and ran in every...

“That is the first thing to learn — not to seek.” Krishnamurti
Packing, driving, running, more running, racing, beer, coffee, more coffee, Wasatch infatuation, seeing friends, leaving friends, goodbye dinners, welcome back dinners, cancelling Internet and phone service, changing address, more coffee, more running, in bed at 1am, back up at 4am…the past few weeks have been hectic to say the least.
Finally, Deanne and I are sitting on the plane heading to France. I sort through photos and documents on my computer until the battery dies. Then, switch to the smaller screen for mindless hours of movie watching, endless fiddling with the headset jack to stop the static, until it’s time for “pasta” with plastic...

“Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”...

“It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.” Anatole France
About ten years ago, I had a bunch of friends come over to my house and told them, “take whatever you want, I’m done with all this stuff.” I had just gotten back from a trip hitchhiking and greyhounding around the Northeastern US and Canada and had come to the conclusion that a) what I own does not define me and b) the less I have with me the easier it is to travel. I adhered to this philosophy pretty strictly through college, wearing the same pair of blue jeans every day and rotating through a couple plain white t-shirts and would pride myself in being able to stuff essentially everything that I owned into a 40L backpack.
Last month, just...